During a medical procedure, for example in a diagnostic angiographic procedure or an angiographic intervention a catheter is typically positioned into a vessel portion of choice. The access is typically via a vessel in the groin, in the aim or in the axilla. The advancement of a guide wire or the catheter can become very difficult since it has to follow the path of the vessel. Hence the selection of the material used to make the guide wire or catheter becomes very crucial. The selection of the material for the guide wire or catheter depends on many factors of which one important factor is the vessel situation or path because some materials are not flexible enough to follow a much curved vessel.
Malformations, for example tumors, can be treated using so called minimally invasive treatment in interventional angiography, interventional oncology, interventional surgery, or interventional neuroradiology. For this treatment, a specialist who could be a physician inspects images that had been acquired before the treatment using diagnostic imaging techniques. These techniques can be for example MR (Magnetic Resonance), CT (Computed Tomography) or angiographic acquisitions (X-ray Angiography), either 2-dimensional (2D) images or 3-dimensional (3D) volumes. One way to treat further growth of the malformations is by performing embolization, where the blood-flow to the malformation is reduced or even stopped by introducing an embolizing material into the feeding vessel of the malformation. For diagnosing, the physician needs to find the one or more feeding vessel which supply blood to the malformation. Also in the case of therapeutic procedures for the treatment, the placement of components, e.g. glue, microspheres, catheters etc. has to be placed ideally in the vessel and the injection of the therapeutic materials, for example the embolizing material has to be performed very precisely into the correct vessel.
In the case of catheter, the selection of the catheter is a compromise of a catheter that can easily be steered and that can be used for very tortuous vessels. Lack of knowledge of specific parameters of the vessels results in the choice of unsuitable catheters which get wasted during the actual procedures resulting in increased cost, increase duration and complexity of the procedure. Hence there is a need for knowing specific physiological characteristics of the vessels to arrive at more accurate decisions on the selection of these types of surgical or therapeutic components.